Few weeks ago I was invited to present the state of the pNFS to the Purdue University. They are interested to be one of the early adopters and I jumped on that opportunity to promote pNFS. The presentation included the deep dive in the protocol and the need for scalability and I continued with the current state of the protocol and the initial client implementations in Linux and Open Solaris.
The presentation and the discussion that followed addressed some basic questions that I expected around why should users trust that NFSv4.1/pNFS will not have the same faith as NFSv4.0. This is a legitimate question that often the pNFS developers in Linux ask themselves and the answer that I gave was same as the developers; pNFS will address many of the HPC needs. After additional details on scalability, performance, availability all the people in the room agreed that it is worth to look closer at pNFS. I recommended them to start looking at the current Fedora distribution that has both server and client pNFS file layout.
As Purdue is a heavy Lustre user, they further asked how would Lustre support pNFS. If you didn’t know, there are patches available for Lustre to support pNFS. I introduced Purdue team to the chief developer of Lustre so they can be the first to test the prototype patches.
This will help the promotion of pNFS in academia.
We need to continue our team effort to promote everywhere in universities pNFS.